6 Technology Considerations with “Almost-Enterprise” Applications

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Although CIOs may not always be driving the adoption of almost-enterprise applications, they need to be ready for them.

Almost-enterprise applications—cloud-based solutions driven by business users independent of their IT departments—require many of the same foundational disciplines that have been leading practices in traditional IT organizations for years, if not decades. Yet they often come into the organization “under the radar” and may stay hidden from IT even as they continue to grow and develop. Eventually, however, almost-enterprise applications invariably land on the CIO’s agenda and, when that happens, the IT team must be ready with a mature set of disciplines to support them.

Here’s a look at six technology areas that CIOs should be prepared to address:

Enterprise information management (EIM). Whether almost-enterprise applications are focused on sales and service effectiveness, information analytics, financial transaction processing, HR, collaboration, or support of other processes, the accuracy and reliability of the underlying data is fundamental to their effectiveness. To help ensure data quality, organizations should apply the main principles of EIM, including master data management; correlation of business entities; data archiving and retention management; and data cleansing. In selecting specific implementation approaches, organizations should be guided by the level of access to data from cloud services (either directly or via administrative tools), as well as the capabilities of data, application, and service-level APIs (application programming interfaces).

Integration (notably, orchestration and event processing). The ability to coordinate long-running, end-to-end business processes across legacy and almost-enterprise applications is essential, especially as transactions increasingly require navigation of the “cloud of clouds”—hybrid footprints traversing multiple cloud providers, coupled with manual tasks and automated workflows. To support service-oriented architecture (SOA) standards, almost-enterprise applications should include foundational event handlers for realizing asynchronous, unpredictable processes. While most of the new class of solution providers have open, extensible architectures that are compliant with SOA, they are in the midst of building out mature integration frameworks.

Security and privacy. Data security and privacy are legal mandates for many industries, imposing restrictions on where data can be physically located and requiring controls for access to sensitive information, including internal intellectual property, private customer and employee data, or business partner’s trade secrets. Identity, authentication, and entitlement services should be implemented enterprise-wide to manage who has access to assets, whether internally or externally sourced. Seamlessly passing credentials across clouds is technically challenging, but progress is underway. More likely, third-party solution providers will allow activities related to ICAM (identity, credential, access management) to be exposed and remotely invoked. In this way, “ICAM-as-a-service” will be tied into core enterprise services.

Maintenance and monitoring tools. IT encounters a familiar pattern for new technology adoption with the initial immaturity of tools and practices for monitoring and maintenance. These include native services for capacity, performance, and health tracking across the stack (network, server, operating system, database, application server, application, user interface); tools for deploying, managing and tracking code; and configuration changes and support activities (such as incident, problem, and release management). In addition, many solutions still have minimal connections to external monitoring and management standards or industry tools (e.g. HP IT Performance Suite and IBM Tivoli).

SDLC (systems development life cycle) skills and methods. The tools and methods that allow configuration or development and deployment of almost-enterprise solutions continue to evolve and emerge very rapidly. Some may already be in the toolbox of the enterprise IT shop, while others should be on their way. For example, “Ruby on Rails” or “Objective-C” may not be in the current enterprise architecture, but CIOs should establish a formal process for evaluating and beginning to use new tools and technologies in a given area. Whether a formal center of excellence or an informal stealth activity, the effort will be attractive to many high-performing IT professionals who value staying ahead of the curve, and could be of value to the business overall.

Furthermore, this generation of almost-enterprise solutions has largely been developed since the advent of Agile methodologies, and, as a result, are ideally suited to them. In fact, employing a traditional waterfall approach with a sharp delineation between “build” and “run” functions will dilute the power of these new architectures. Often, the embrace of cloud solutions is an effective trigger to drive a modernization of IT delivery approaches.

Cloud pricing and contract agreements. Vendor, usage, and contract management have become essential functions as services are increasingly sourced via the cloud. Given the potential scale of almost-enterprise solutions, attempting to control these factors manually could lead to disaster, most likely in the form of runaway usage that causes business disruptions or exorbitant fees due to unnegotiated ceiling clauses. In addition, many of these solutions introduce new topics— SLAs, exit clauses, data usage rights, and backup and recovery guarantees—that must be taken into consideration. This will put pressure on the contract and vendor management functions to stay on top of the changing nature of contracts.

CIOs cannot take a hands-off approach to almost-enterprise applications. The same set of widely recognized practices that support traditional enterprise solutions should be applied to the proliferating array of almost-enterprise applications, to facilitate high standards in areas such as data quality, security and privacy, and contracting.

6 Technology Considerations with “Almost-Enterprise” Applications

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